Multiple ecosystem services and disservices of the urban forest establishing their connections with landscape structure and sociodemographics

• A framework for spatially assessing ecosystem services and dis-services is provided, integrating remote sensing and on-ground data together with peer reviewed models.
• Vegetation cover in addition to fragmentation metrics need to be account for linkages between landscape structure and ecosystem services.
• Population and level of education showed to be the main factors influencing the provision of multiple ecosystem services.
• The local scale in which multiple ecosystem services were quantified is useful for management and policy making.

The promotion of sustainable cities is critical under future environmental change and population growth. Cities in the present and future can ensure the provision of ecosystem services to their urban inhabitants. The urban forest is one of the main suppliers of ecosystem services in urban areas, and can provide the base information to quantify ecosystem services and disservices, detecting the areas were low provision of those occur. In this study multiple ecosystem services and disservices were quantified using transferable indicators in order to detect areas for environmental improvement. The set of spatially explicit indicators enables the detection of areas of low and high provision of ecosystem services. The analysis showed synergies existing among regulating, provisioning and supporting services, while trade-offs were found with cultural services and regulating, provisioning and supporting services. Ecosystem services provision was positively related to the amount of vegetation and negatively related to its degree of fragmentation. A high provision of ecosystem services was found in less populated areas, with more educated and affluent people, highlighting the strong relations existing between social vulnerabilities and areas of low provision of services. Results from this research provide insights on the role of policy makers on better distributed supply of ecosystem services and on how the landscape structure can be modified to plan for sustainable cities.